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Hospital Pharmacy - Meeting the Needs of Patients
The European Association of Hospital Pharmacists (EAHP's) Position Paper on Access to Medicines advocates for affordable medicines of good quality that are provided in a timely manner to patients. To achieve this goal barriers to treatment access need to be broken down and the uptake of enablers that promote and safeguard the access of patients to both new life-saving medicines and older, essential medicines must be increased.
Hospital pharmacists across the world are working every day for their patients to ensure that they receive the medication they need to improve their health and to prevent and cure diseases. However, sometimes the medicine that is suited for an individual patient is not accessible. Growing healthcare expenditure has become a problem for many European countries. Innovative drugs, in particular, place an additional strain on already tight hospital budgets. Patients are directly affected and increasingly faced with avoidable accessibility and affordability issues. Besides the constraints faced by public health budgets, there are other barriers to treatment access. These include the growing problem of medicines shortages and delayed market access for new treatments in some European regions or increased out of pocket costs for patients. The European Association of Hospital Pharmacists (EAHP's)
Barriers to treatment access
• Lack of purposeful procurement practices • National pricing and reimbursement policy choices jeopardising patients' adequate access • Medicine shortages • Unavailability in certain markets, leading to inequity between Member States • Health Technology Assessments (HTAs), including common reports at EU level • Collaboration and best practice sharing on pricing and reimbursement • Increasing the use of prevention measures • Fostering innovation and research
To achieve an equilibrium between the barriers and the enablers to treatment access, EAHP:
• recommends that the expertise of the hospital pharmacist in pharmacoeconomics and the assessment of drug effectiveness be leveraged and well utilised within value-based evaluation approaches. Additionally, the implementation of the forthcoming HTA Regulation should be used for the expansion of healthcare professional input in HTAs at both European and national level. • supports the view of EURIPID and strongly recommends that this tool is not applied on its own but in conjunction with other policy measures, including transparency; • calls on hospital managers and its members to work together to increase the uptake of risk assessments in hospitals; and, • urges increased investment to support the development of innovative proposals and the encouragement of practice-based research projects to investigate new fields of infectious disease control such as immunotherapy and to optimise the cost-effectiveness of systems for surveillance on antibiotic use and resistance.
Enablers to treatment access
pharmacoeconomics and the assessment of drug effectiveness be leveraged and well utilised within value-based evaluation approaches. Additionally, the implementation of the forthcoming HTA Regulation should be used for the expansion of healthcare professional input in HTAs at both European and national level. • supports the view of EURIPID and strongly recommends that this tool is not applied on its own but in conjunction with other policy measures, including transparency;
Position Paper on Access to • calls on hospital managers and Medicines advocates for affordable its members to work together medicines of good quality that to increase the uptake of risk are provided in a timely manner assessments in hospitals; and, to patients. To achieve this goal barriers to treatment access need to be broken down and the uptake of enablers that promote and safeguard the access of patients to both new life-saving medicines and older, essential medicines must be increased. • urges increased investment to support the development of innovative proposals and the encouragement of practicebased research projects to investigate new fields of infectious disease control such as immunotherapy and to To achieve an equilibrium between optimise the cost-effectiveness the barriers and the enablers to of systems for surveillance on treatment access, EAHP: antibiotic use and resistance. • recommends that the expertise of the hospital pharmacist in
New Head of Pharmacology
The Department of Pharmacology at University College Cork have announced Professor Christian Waeber as our new Head of Department, taking over the reins from Professor David Kerins who had a challenging year as Interim head of department during Covid. Prior to his appointment Professor Waeber joined University College Cork (UCC) in 2013 where he is now Professor of Pharmacology, a joint appointment between the School of Pharmacy and the Department of Pharmacology. Early in his career, Professor Waeber worked as a Ph.D. student at Novartis Basel. Professor Waeber then joined as a postdoctoral fellow the laboratory of Joel Bockaert, at the “Centre CNRS-INSERM de PharmacologieEndocrinologie” in Montpellier. In 1993, Prof Waeber joined Harvard Medical School to characterize the pharmacological profile of 5-HT1like receptors inhibiting neurogenic inflammation, a research carried out in collaboration with Michael Moskowitz. His current research at UCC is focused on characterizing the role of the adaptive immune system is stroke recovery. Professor Waeber is looking forward to the challenge this new role presents, and all of us at the Department of Pharmacology wish him every success in his new role.
